Breaking the News

Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption

Alex Marlow

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982160753
• eBook ISBN: 9781982160760
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the editor in chief of Breitbart News, the New York Times bestselling "must-read" (Sean Hannity) investigation into how the establishment media became weaponized against Donald Trump and his supporters on behalf of the political left. In this timely and "important book" (Glenn Beck), Marlow explains how the establishment press destroyed its own credibility with a relentless stream of "fake news" designed to smear Donald Trump and his supporters while advancing a leftist agenda. He also reveals key details on how our information gatekeepers truly operate and why America's "fake news" moment might never end.Breitbart—and Trump—began banging the drum about "fake news" during the 2016 election, and it resonated with millions of voters because they intuitively knew the corporate media was willing to say or write anything to achieve their political ends. It's a battle cry that continues to this day. Deeply researched and eye-opening, Breaking the News rips back the curtain on the inner workings of how the establishment media weaponizes information to achieve their political and cultural ends.

CHAPTER 1 THE RISE OF BREITBART AND THE FAKE NEWS HALL OF SHAME

Just after Trump’s victory and his appointment of former Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon as “Chief Strategist,” Breitbart began to receive scrutiny unlike anything we had ever seen before. We’d certainly seen our share of good news cycles and bad, but we were on a roll of late. I had just gotten back from the United Kingdom, where I had spent much of the summer covering the British referendum to leave the European Union, otherwise known as Brexit. Nigel Farage, then the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and figurehead of the anti–European Union movement, said that “Brexit would not have happened without Breitbart.”¹ Reporting on Hillary Clinton by Breitbart staffers, especially Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, had become imbedded in the consciousness of the American electorate. And of course, Breitbart was the first major American media outlet to take Donald Trump seriously as a presidential contender.

With the elevation of Bannon, the smears were flying at a rate that we hadn’t seen in our history. Here were some of the most common falsehoods that were repeated about our merry band of grassroots journalists:

Breitbart news is anti-Semitic. Perhaps the most oft-repeated smear on us is also the most absurd. Andrew Breitbart and Larry Solov, both Jewish, conceived of the idea for Breitbart.com while on a sojourn in Israel, where they visited holy sites and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The first editor-in-chief of the website and current senior editor-at-large, Joel Pollak, is an orthodox Jew. Many of the top editors past and present are Jews. My mother was raised Jewish. Breitbart News has a Jerusalem bureau where we cover the Jewish state from an overwhelmingly pro-Israel perspective.

The preponderance of evidence against the claim we’re anti-Semitic raises the question, where did the smear come from? Almost certainly it is based on this single headline: “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”²

That’s it. Certainly, that’s an intense headline, and one that normally wouldn’t get published on our virtual pages. But the article, a takedown of apostate Republican magazine editor and “Never Trump” pundit Bill Kristol, was written by prominent Jewish intellectual David Horowitz, and this was his preferred headline. What’s more, in the article, Horowitz criticizes Kristol for not being sufficiently pro-Israel. Israel, of course, is the only Jewish state on earth.

Rarely do media hit pieces on Breitbart give any of this context. So, a single opinion headline from a Jewish thought leader is used to cancel out thousands of pro-Jewish articles written by Jewish writers and editors.

This isn’t bias. This is weaponized political media designed to destroy us.

Breitbart news is racist and sexist. This one is nearly as easy to debunk, if you use the traditional definition of racism (discriminating against people based on their skin tone). As it happens, Breitbart News’ entertainment editor is black (Jerome Hudson), our copy chief is a black woman (Adrienne Ross), our world editor is a Latina woman (Frances Martel), our chief defense correspondent is an Asian woman (Kristina Wong), and our top video editor is also a woman (Amand House). Not to mention numerous Jewish staffers including those mentioned above. And those are just examples from middle management. Journalist Wil S. Hylton reported in the New York Times Magazine that I personally have “a pretty good record of promoting women and minorities.”³

Since 2015, Breitbart News has published the Cartel Chronicles. This series is designed to be a channel for citizen journalism and other reporting on cartel activity throughout Mexico, the United States, and beyond. The Cartel Chronicles gives a voice to the Mexican citizens who are the greatest victims of cartel violence, as well as countless Americans who are harmed by the illegal drug and human smuggling trade. We publish the Cartel Chronicles in both English and Spanish.⁴

For years, publicly traded SiriusXM has given Breitbart News between 23 and 38 hours of live national radio a week. At least 2 of those weekly hours are hosted by a black woman, Sonnie Johnson. It would be quite a feat for a racist network to produce two thousand hours a year of original broadcasting without producing even a single racist sound bite, yet we somehow manage!

As for me, my first job in conservative media was with my first favorite talk show host: a black man named Larry Elder, who now hosts a nationally syndicated show for the Salem Radio Network.

So, Breitbart is a pro-Jewish website with a reputation for treating women and minorities well and publishes many articles in Spanish. Yet we were branded racist. Why? It’s because the Democrat Media Complex, which has been weaponized against the Right and traditional American values, has changed the definition of racism to mean, in essence, anything associated with or supportive of Donald Trump or conservative America. Occasionally, even being insufficiently anti-Trump or politically correct is enough to get you branded with the scarlet “R.”

So, everyone on the right is now “racist” to one degree or another. Thus, the Left has to invent new language to distinguish between the really bad people and your garden-variety rubes. Thus…

Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right.” The expression “alt-right” is relatively new and if you asked ten people to define it, those who have even heard of it would likely give you differing answers. That said, they would probably associate the term with racism and Jew-hatred.

Luckily for us, this one might be the easiest to refute of them all: professor and noted Israeli-American author Yochai Benkler, who has studied Breitbart with interdisciplinary colleagues at Harvard and MIT, literally told the New York Times Magazine in 2017 that “Breitbart is not the alt-right.”

Case closed, right?

Well, no, because Steve Bannon once told Mother Jones that we are “the platform for the alt-right.”⁵ Though Bannon has a genius and a magnetism that is often productive and usually compelling, he is also prone to using declarative language when he is entirely incorrect. Occasionally he’s a visionary; other times he’s a WWE professional wrestler. This was an example of the latter. I wasn’t there for the conversation, nor do I know exactly what Bannon was thinking, but he certainly wasn’t telling a reporter that our pro-Israel outlet, owned and edited by Jews, is also anti-Semitic. Yet, if you read news reports about Breitbart, that’s exactly how the comment is portrayed.

At that point in time, we had published the most thorough reporting on the alt-right and its various factions earlier that year in a piece titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”⁶ The article was widely read and generally well received; Bloomberg News included it on their 2016 “Jealousy List” of the stories they wished they had written.⁷

So, Breitbart certainly popularized right-wing ideas that were an alternative to establishment conservatives, and we had written comprehensively about the “alt-right,” so it’s easy to see how Bannon could have made this flub.

But a flub is all it was, as confirmed by Harvard’s Benkler.

Yet, our weaponized media never let the facts get in the way of a favorable narrative. So, they have used that single phrase to define us instead of examining the tens of thousands of pieces of content or the thousands of hours of radio we produce each year.

All’s fair in love and war, as the saying goes.

And this is war.

Breitbart News peddles conspiracies. Of the smears on Breitbart News, this is the one that has gotten the least traction. But still, it merits a quick review.

Wikipedia in their wildly inaccurate entry on Breitbart News (remember, it’s not bias, it’s weaponized media) lists four total conspiracy theories we have allegedly peddled over the years (remember, Breitbart News was founded well over a decade ago and publishes about one hundred original articles each day). Here they are:

1. 1. Wikipedia falsely connects Breitbart News with the “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. We have always presumed Obama was born in America. In fact, even when we broke the story of what we believe to be the origins of birtherism (a promotional pamphlet used by Obama’s literary agency in 1991 that states he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii”), we clearly stated within the piece that we believe he was born in the USA anyway. From a disclaimer we tacked at the top of the article: “Andrew Breitbart was never a ‘Birther,’ ” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.”⁸
2. 2. Wikipedia claims we promoted Pizzagate, a bizarre conspiracy that key members of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle ran a child sex ring through a northwestern D.C. pizza parlor using coded emails. Wikipedia states flatly that we hyped the absurd story and, as of spring 2020, cited four source links to back up their claim: one to the New York Times, one to Snopes, one to PolitiFact, and one to the Daily Beast, all frequent targets of Breitbart News’s media reporters.⁹ Of the four, the word “Breitbart” appears only in the Daily Beast piece; none of the four link to a single article where we promoted “Pizzagate.” Breitbart’s Wikipedia page is “locked,” which means it is nearly impossible to get this blatant falsehood removed from our page.
3. 3. The third “conspiracy theory” we allegedly peddled is simply because we quoted Roger Stone accurately. Breitbart transcribed an interview between Steve Bannon and Roger Stone in which the conservative provocateur alleged that Huma Abedin had ties to a “global terrorist entity.” Our reporting does not confirm nor deny Stone’s claims. If reporting accurately on what a prominent figure says is considered an endorsement or even a promotion of “conspiracy theories,” Breitbart is also guilty of pushing thousands of conspiracy theories lobbed by the ladies of The View and CNN hosts we post on a daily basis.
4. 4. Wikipedia says we published “claims that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration supported ISIS.” This is an exaggeration. Breitbart published a single article by a former junior reporter who misconstrued a memo Hillary Cli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: Throw Your Body on the Gears
• Chapter 1: The Rise of Breitbart and the Fake News Hall of Shame
• Chapter 2: Meet the Press
• Chapter 3: Mob Rule Media: The ‘New York Times’ in the Age of Woke
• Chapter 4: NBC “News” and the Corporatization of Mass Media
• Chapter 5: Beijing Bloomberg
• Chapter 6: Sleeping Giants and the Cancellation of MAGA
• Chapter 7: Mostly Peaceful Riots: The Story of Black Lives Matter
• Chapter 8: Cheat by Mail and the True Story of the 2020 Election
• Chapter 9: The Trump Virus
• Chapter 10: The Masters of the Universe
• Chapter 11: A Time to Heal
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright